The number moved because you asked it to

Putting a target on a metric buys you an improvement and spends the information the metric used to carry. Most dashboards are full of numbers that have already been spent.

By Steve 5 min read
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A familiar situation: the operations dashboard is green for the third quarter running. On-time delivery is up. Average resolution time is down. Utilisation is at target. And yet the business does not feel better: customers are no easier to keep, the delivery team is no calmer, and the margin has not moved. Nobody is lying. Every number is accurate. The problem is that the numbers stopped being measurements some time ago and became products. This is the mechanism behind what is usually called Goodhart’s law, and in the public-sector literature…

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